Manipulating Hand Dyed Yarns

While at Stitches Midwest I had the chance to take a wonderful class with Laura Bryant of Prism yarns on manipulating hand-dyed yarns for knitting. This was the last class on Sunday and I had trepidation at having an all day class on Sunday because usually I am extremely tired by then that I can't concentrate. Laura's topic was SO interesting and her yarns so beautiful, however that I had NO problem staying awake and fascinated by the topic.

The problem with variegated yarn is that it tends to pool in little strips like this (and while with some yarns this can be exciting and attractive...

...with some yarns, it just isn't that impressive. Although the knitting here is beautiful and the patterns use the yarn well.)

This class was on new ways to handle these hand-dyed yarns. By doing some math there are ways to create some lovely and regular types of patterns with these yarns. Here are a few of the things Laura has done with Prism yarns.

This scarf uses a halved pattern and is even more gorgeous in real life!

Here are some of her other examples.

This technique can be used on other hand-dyed yarns too. This is a swatch done with Lorna's Lace yarn. It has a slightly different pattern because it is painted flat and thus has an alternating skein color (red yellow blue yellow back to red) Prism yarns will tend to have only three colors and not repeat because they are dipped in the dye.

This shawl was in the fashion show and it was good to get to see it up close.

Laura demonstrates her point above.

Here is another view.

It was a little cool in the classroom so Laura got to demo her knitwear! In class we worked with several patterns. It is important to have exactly the right stitch count. In the lower sample I was off by one stitch and thus the colors lined up and did not move across the piece (bottom half) when I added a stitch, the color started to sweep diagonally across the piece. (Prism Andee yarn - embers).

The above pieces use garter stitch (above) and ribbing (below).

I've been playing with this at home since my return and had the same problem with this fisherman's rib piece - note the colors aren't moving blue is on the left and green on the right.

By adding a few more stitches, you can see that the colors start to become more lively. (Eventually the blue will cross to the right and the yellow to the left.)

It was a VERY interesting class. Here is an example that we did in class with the same yarn (Prism Symphony).

Incidentally look what I found in my garden yesterday. I had no idea!

I had heard zucchini was easy to grow! I guess I let it go a bit long. Here is the harvest!

We had half of it for dinner and it was good (not woody or tough) - Pretty cool!